shuyung wrote:
I've read back through your posts. The entirety of your argument seems to be that you have to give evolution its shot. Are you allowing modern medicine to influence your pregnancy? Taking pre-natal vitamins, testing for various detrimental disorders, etc.? If you are, you seem to be somewhat inconsistent.
But leaving that aside for the moment, the discussion currently is when to consider something a person, not a human. You may be equating the two, but that's a false equivalence. Can something be a human but not be a person? Can something be a person but not be a human?
We are not aware at this time of any life form that can be a person, but not a human, although many fictional examples exist.
As for being a human but not a person, there are three possibilities for that:
1) It is something human that can or will eventually develop fully into a human person.
2) It is something human that, due to defect or damage, is unable to complete its development into a human person. A good example would be a
Anencephaletic fetus.
3) It has died.
The answer to both of your questions on the face of it is "yes" both conditions are possible.
However, both questions are irrelevant. At the moment we are unaware of examples of nonhuman persons, although there is room for argument in the case of certain dolphins and whales, maybe even chimpanzees.
The more important end is the "human but not a person" argument. There are two stages: "Will become a person, barring death before reaching that stage" and "is a person". A human being that reaches the stage where it would be considered a person, but due to injury or defect fails to exhibit full human sapience, is still a person. The rest of society is
obligated to find a competent, trustworthy adult (at a minimum) to place that person's rights and welfare in care of.
Otherwise, we go down the road of utilitarian ethics that claims we are "specisist" if we treat a disabled human better than, say, a German Shepherd that technically has greater faculties. This is reprehensible for 3 reasons:
1) It is a stolen concept fallacy. It attempts to recognize mental faculties while at the same time rejecting the "meatsack" (to use the preferred predjudicial term of such scum), but ignores the fact that the default mental qualities of a being are determined by its species (i.e. its "meatsack") and that while a German Shepherd of standard mental capability is the default, a human at that level has been the victim of accident, disease, or deliberate attack.
2) It places conformism with utilitarian ethical reasoning principles above the actual effects of that reasoning. Disregarding the very questionable weighting of benefit and harm in this line of reasoning, the basic fact of the matter is that conforming to ethical principles is supposed to be a means to being able to live as a species with each other, not an end. These sorts of people, simply to win an argument, would have you believe that one must behave "ethically" even if it leads to annihilation as a species, which rather calls into question the point of ethical behavior. Moreover it is hilarious that most of these people would scoff at the idea of martyrdom for any religion, but demand martyrdom on the altar of "ethics" which don't even bother to promise an afterlife to the fanatic.
3) At the most practical level, it allows ones rights, regardless of whether you believe those to be natural or created by law, to be abrogated simply because you are unable to contest it. If you are born seriously retarded your assets (that you might have inherited) can "ethically" be confiscated to pay for social services because "you won't miss them" and therefore you are not harmed. Worse, if you are a vegetable due to accident or disease, the same can be done. Essentially, ethical behavior amounts to "we can rob those who are too impaired to defend themselves" in this line of reasoning. Those that pursue this reasoning sometimes try to deflect criticism with "well but in practical matters most people have families and we don't do those things because it would traumatize the still-competent family" and while this is doubtless true, the fact that their defense of this reasoning is that it's practically unlikely to occur on a regular basis just reveals how utterly bankrupt it is. The other argument inevitably revolves around dead people, and says things like "but then dead people would have the same rights as live people" and attempts to pretend that the condition of
having died is some sort of triviality that does not, in and of itself, put the dead person out of bounds of being a person. In point of fact, they are still a person, just a dead one, and we do provide a certain degree of protection for them simply because the rest of us also would not like to be robbed blind as soon as we're in our graves.
People that seriously think like this are among the most disgusting human beings on earth. They are the enemies of everyone: liberals, conservatives, communists, socialist, libertarians, anarchists, nazis, facists and the National Hockey League alike.
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